A Cup of Poetry

William Wordsworth, along with the other great romantic poets wrote about intense feelings of joy, beauty, and pain. In celebration of the movie Bright Star, which depicts the intense love affair between Fanny Brawne and great romantic poet John Keats, the last few episodes of A Cup of Poetry have featured the romantic poets Keats, Blake and Wordsworth.

The great romantic poets wrote about intense feelings of love and sadness. In celebration of the movie Bright Star, which depicts the intense love affair between Fanny Brawne and great romantic poet John Keats, the next few episodes of A Cup of Poetry will feature the lovely, dramatic poetry of Keats, Blake and Wordsworth.

In the late 1700's and early 1800's, the great romantic poets wrote about intense feelings of love and sadness. In celebration of the movie Bright Star, which depicts the intense love affair between Fanny Brawne and great romantic poet John Keats, the next few episodes of A Cup of Poetry will feature the lovely, dramatic poetry of Keats, Blake and Wordsworth.

Written in 1845 by famous dark poet Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" has frightened generations of readers with its supernatural mood and haunting melancholy rhythm.

Hallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler's newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings.

Anne Waldman reads and discusses her newest work, Manatee Humanity. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still teaches. Her poetry collections include Iovis I, Iovis II, Fast Speaking Woman, Helping the Dreamer, and Kill or Cure. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.

A.A. Milne lived from 1882 - 1956 and was a talented novelist, poet, playwright and essayist. He is the author of the childhood favorites Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. This week's Cup of Poetry corresponds with the publication of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus, a companion volume that truly captures the style of A. A. Milne and a worthy sequel to The House at Pooh Corner and Winnie-the-Pooh.

This week we feature an interview and reading with poet Alison Hawthorne Deming. She reads from Rope, her fourth collection of poems. Rope follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, and the search for extraterrestrial life, all linked by the poet's faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity - virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment.

Dorothy Parker was famous for her cynicism and the concentration of her judgments and she has been closely associated with modern urbane humour. She is widely known for her spoken wit, her book reviews in The New Yorker, her poems and her sketches.

While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T.S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective.

Millay's first three books of lyrics and sonnets are collected here: Renascence, Second April, and A Few Figs from Thistles. With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. By the end of his brief career, he had written poems of such beauty, imagination and generosity of spirit, that he had - unwittingly - fulfilled his wish that he should 'be among the English poets after my death'.

This poem is a celebration of New York City glorifying the metropolitan atmosphere that makes the city so unique. Poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war he spent his entire life revising and adding to his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer.

The poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of "mixing" to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that all things - no matter how disparate - are parts of the whole.

New from Penguin Classics, originally composed in Sanskrit sometime between 400 BC and 400 AD, The Mahabharata - with one hundred thousand stanzas of verse - is one of the longest poems in existence. At the heart of the saga is a conflict between two branches of a royal family whose feud culminates in a titanic eighteen-day battle. Exploring such timeless subjects as dharma (duty), artha (purpose), and kama (pleasure) in a mythic world of warfare, magic, and beauty, this is a magnificent and legendary Hindu text of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent.